Daemon

It's been my experience that when people who are relatively new to FreeBSD and not really sure of how things work, excessive fiddling with this and that, trying out this program and such is usually when they run into problems they can't yet solve themselves.

Not that I'm trying to discourage, dissuade or dishearten you in the least. It's the best way to learn IMO. But if things are working well, sometimes it's best to know when to leave well enough alone.

That said, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to switch to any DE or WM you choose. If you do have problems or question of how to go about it use the forum search function or refer to the Handbook to find the answer. If you still have problems someone will be more than happy to assist you.

Member

It's been my experience that when people who are relatively new to FreeBSD and not really sure of how things work, excessive fiddling with this and that, trying out this program and such is usually when they run into problems they can't yet solve themselves.

Not that I'm trying to discourage, dissuade or dishearten you in the least. It's the best way to learn IMO. But if things are working well, sometimes it's best to know when to leave well enough alone.

That said, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to switch to any DE or WM you choose. If you do have problems or question of how to go about it use the forum search function or refer to the Handbook to find the answer. If you still have problems someone will be more than happy to assist you.

Active Member

I ran 11.2-RELEASE for awhile with multiple DEs, and it was fun, but I think your concerns are legitimate. I didn't expect things to work as well as they actually did, but, when I broke things, it was, as you've said, hard to figure out what the problem was. It really is complicated. I was just playing around and experimenting, on a temporary throw-away host that was only intended for testing. Things I did in one environment would affect the other environments. For instance, after installing KDE I discovered I had lots of KDE applications showing up in the menus for other environments, and vice-versa. As another example, I set up one DE to automatically start Firefox at login time, and then discovered that all my DEs were automatically starting Firefox too.

Different DEs have different power management daemons, and I think they were unaware of one another, and unintentionally interfering with each other. Ultimately I scrubbed that system and now I'm testing different DEs by installing multiple, otherwise identical FreeBSD installs on different partitions of a multi-boot host, with each DE installed separately on a different partition. This is working well for me now, and allows me to isolate problems when they arise. One can't realistically expect the people who design and support these desktop systems to anticipate all of the many problems that might arise from coexisting on a host which has multiple DEs installed on it.

One thing I have grown to really appreciate in FreeBSD is that the core OS is completely separated from anything the user installs, unlike Linux. You may break something fiddling with different DEs, but the system will still boot. Might not boot into X, but the OS will keep on trucking. Different set of tools to update the OS vice installing and updating software. If it all goes to heck, you can always get back to the core OS and start over...